“... and the film was a big hit with US military personnel stationed overseas during the Second World War: ‘Gooood morning, Potsdam!’ Forgotten it may be, but Reveille has one of the all-time great soundtracks: Count Basie, Duke Ellington, proto rock’n’roller Ella Mae Morse doing ‘Cow Cow Boogie’, and, in his Hollywood debut, a slender young reed ...”

“... In​ Jill Paton Walsh’s novel Goldengrove (1972), set shortly after the Second World War, the adolescent heroine, Madge, goes on holiday to Cornwall. She falls a little in love with a professor of English literature who has been blinded in action, and reads aloud to him. One of the passages he has her recite is an analysis of Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Of Weeping’:Weep me not dead means: ‘do not make me cry myself to death; do not kill me with the sight of your tears; do not cry for me as for a man already dead, when, in fact, I am in your arms,’ and, with a different sort of feeling, ‘do not exert your power over the sea so as to make it drown me by sympathetic magic’; there is a conscious neatness in the ingenuity of the phrasing, perhaps because the same idea is being repeated, which brings out the change of tone in this verse ...”

“... an interview with Eric Alterman for the latter’s excellent book Sound and Fury, about the pundit class in Washington, Safire conceded that ‘yes, psychologically, he may have been seeking to minimise the relative importance of the crimes committed by his former boss, with this silliness.’ So now I’ve stopped ‘gating’ and will never try it ...”

“... celebrations of himself and his illustrious career, from his time as an undergraduate at Columbia, class of 1950, with grades of A-plus from Lionel Trilling and Fred Dupee, continuing at Clare College, Cambridge, where he got a First in English and an invitation from F. R. Leavis, a figure he came to admire more even than he admired Trilling, to write for ...”

“... biographical details. Although he was born in Australia shortly after the end of the First World War, Hillary came to England at an early age and had a thoroughly English upper middle-class education – prep school, followed by public school (Shrewsbury) and Oxford (Trinity College). Despite the influence of his English ...”

“... to this dilemma. Co-opting Hegel’s language, he drew a distinction between people being a class ‘in themselves’, when they are seen to act in their objective material interests, and becoming a class ‘for themselves’, when they self-consciously recognise themselves as belonging to a collective. It is no ...”

“... that it terrifies the tender but not the tough. The narrators of the first two novels, middle-class American citizens, admit to being terrified out of their wits: they fear that the martyr-venerating warriors of Islam and the rough Catholics of Latin America may not be deterred from small-scale warfare by the threat of international escalation. Acts of ...”

“... Jean-Pierre Melville, ‘America is the sublime and the abominable.’Critics of American racism, class inequality and foreign policy have tended to focus on the abominable. ‘Two centuries ago,’ Frantz Fanon wrote in 1961, ‘a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States became a monster, in which ...”

“... her books are dramatised; Unity and Diana, the Nazis, are subjects for studies of British upper-class fascism; Debo, as she was always known, the châtelaine of Chatsworth, attracts the interest of architectural historians and fans of the aristocracy; Jessica, known as Decca, is the communist. Pamela, once satirised in Private Eye as ‘Doreen: the unknown ...”

“... Ronald Reagan left office more popular than any departing President since the end of World War Two. The same month Americans interviewed in a telephone poll achieved on a happiness scale the highest score in decades. Reagan’s popularity and American self-satisfaction have not risen together because of any general improvement in the standard of living: the rich are richer than they were a decade ago, the poor are poorer, and the average American stands about the same ...”

“... about their souls and their relationship to God – or, indeed, about exploitation and the class war – he was talking to them about their bodies and their relationships with their parents; and, above all, about their relationship to their own spoken words. In this medical context experiences that were mad and strange were called symptoms; the ...”

“... and of the need for an era of honour after so many years of moaning and lamentation. Class politics also come into it. As Fawaz Gerges observes in his history of Islamic State, al-Qaida’s leadership has in large part been drawn from the elite and professional classes. Islamic State is more of a working-...”

“... with the language of the old professions outranking that of the newer ones, aligns with the class system; in this hierarchy the jargon with the highest status is the Queen’s English. The attitudes of Hudson’s reviewers have become a part of the content of Walter Nash’s book. It is pleasing that a scholar so commonsensically frustrated by modern ...”

“... just a little uncanny. Most of the mayhem transpires within families or between neighbours, and class conflict is often the animating force. The settings are only glimpsed, and language does the job of making the goings-on strange: in ‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’, it’s the father’s voice in diary form, his clipped syntax eliding subjects and articles ...”

“... to try to say, I ask you to join Iris and me, crossing Devon on a motorbike not long after the war. Empty roads, no crash-helmets. We were going too fast and indulging our childish habit of throwing high-sounding philosophical phrases at each other. (I think this was a hint taken from John Buchan’s autobiography, where he links stretches of countryside ...”